paper- quality issues in management

8/8/2019 Paper- Quality Issues in Management

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quality is developed in the International as well as Indian psyche. In

management education, quality has become a necessity & circumstances

require total quality management. To make India an intellectual capital of

the world we have to rethink about the management education & efforts

should be made to create a dynamic environment, so that we just dont end

up producing managers in place of producing leaders.

Management education in India is not very old; it has taken its practical

shape during early sixties with establishment of Indian Institute of

Management to train the people with management concepts. After that many

institutions, universities have also come forward to provide management

education to cater the increasing demand of good managers. Recently and

particularly during the last 8-9 years the country has witnessed a tremendous

growth in the founding of management institutions most of them in private

sector offering management programs in different functional areas of

management. Concurrently, there is a mushrooming of B-schools in the

country: over 2,000 institutes, of which about 1000 are certified by the All

India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), leading to issues of quality.

In this context it becomes essential to re-examine the entire structure,

content, purpose and pattern of management education.

Some of the common feature of most of the management/business education

courses, in which quality important is regard, can be summed up, as under.

Poor coverage of Indian business & socioeconomic environment

with less global perspective.

More emphasis on theoretical aspects.

Use of out-dated case-material.

Least institute-industry linkage.


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Lack of research base.

Poor admission procedure.

Inadequacy of resources & infrastructure.

Old pedagogy.

Traditional evaluation system.

The qualitative aspect of management education is also as important as its

technical aspects. Management Education should not just equip a student

with technical skills and expertise, but also develop in him the right attitude.

For instance Japan is considering a new legislation, where intellectual

property can be considered as a security against loan and if we want to

emerge as an economic power, we will have to do so through instilling

quality in our management education. It should be our endeavor to produce

world class technical & management personnel who would be sought

globally. Total quality management should be inducted to make the

management education effective. TQM is a style of management that has

worked for several decades overseas and is receiving growing attention in

the United States. Now some colleges and universities are beginning to

recognize that TQM values are more compatible with higher education than

many existing management systems.

In India, All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) is entrusted

with the responsibility of regulating, controlling & ensuring the quality of

management education in the country. The formation of National Board of

Accreditation (NBA) & the of workshops that it had organized have

contributed substantially to widespread awareness & concern for the quality

of management education, but can the AICTE in all honesty, claim that their

approvals would result in quality management education of global standard.


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According to Bill Gates, The chairman of Microsoft Corporation, U.S.A.,"

You need to have specialized knowledge a skill while maintaining a broad

perspectiveNo one should assume that the expertise he has today will

suffice tomorrow, so a willingness to lean is critical". This statement is also

resulting in a need of quality improvement with the change. So a strong

relationship exists between the principles of Total Quality Management &

the best practices of management education.

In the context of the imperative needs of Indian economy & the

preconditions of multilateral corporation among wealth-creating national

entities, the following broad themes & dimensions of management teaching

and research seem to be emerging:

Requirement of well coordinated & flexible orchestration of the

government's industrial technology, trade, education, labor, rural

development, infrastructure & economic policies directed toward

expansion & technological up gradation of all national economy in an

ongoing manner.

Management of technology & innovation towards continual

strengthening of the country's & the companies technological

capabilities through innovation; technology acquisition, assimilation

& development, skill formation & both short & long-term

collaborative development of nationally relevant core technologies.

Identification & creation of an easily accessible bank of best industry

practices across the world in all areas ranging from production &

marketing to finance, logistics & R&D.

Enhancement of the nation-wide development & use of information

technology for development & use of information technology for


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accelerating towards break through improvements in cost-reduction,

speed, output, quality & performance.

Extensive use of business process reengineering & Total Quality

Management in & by Indian enterprise towards raising their

productivity & quality to world class levels.

But before moving on to the thrust areas of management education requiring

quality improvements lets see how we can work on our young management

graduates to make them a leader not a mere manager:

1. Pay more attention in classrooms towards understanding of the forces andimpulses driving globalization and establish exchanges for students to go

overseas.

2. Instill qualities of leadership through multiple competencies such as IQ

(Intelligence Quotient), Emotional Quotient (EQ), and Spiritual Quotient

(SQ).

3. Prepare them for solving problems skills in a highly uncertain

environment with the ability to think on the feet.

4. Develop the ability to introspect and reflect rather than accept received

knowledge at face value.

5. Develop the ability to communicate, present, defend and persuade their

ideas.

6. Inculcate an integrated, holistic multi-disciplinary approach rather than

throw isolated snippets of disparate facts originating from one particular

discipline. Team teaching is one of the ways in which this can be promoted.


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7. Nurture creativity and innovation rather than stick with the current single

right answer approach. Dont provide them with fully cooked recipes and

solutions but the tools to think, analyze and apply their knowledge.

To groom our students in this manner following should be the thrust area of

management education where qualitative measures should be taken:

Course Curriculum:

There is a need to improvise our curriculums in a way to make it applied &

realistic. Syllabi should be revised & updated regularly. Research orientation

in curriculum is required. The content of the curriculum should be such that

there is similarity between the rationality that is taught in the classroom and

the ground reality, which a student has to actually face. Projects assigned

should be more practical and students should go back to the same

organizations to study various departments like HR, finance and marketing,

in order to get a holistic understanding.

Faculty Development:

Faculty members being the most crucial factor in the management education

process, it is a stupendous task to meet the faculty needs of the rapidly

expending management institution system. There is an acute shortage of

high quality management teachers, particularly in the functional areas like

marketing, finance & also integrative subjects like strategic management.

Faculty selection should be made on merit only & compromises should not

be the part of selection. Full time permanent faculty should be encourages,

so that they can devote full-time for the organization. Faculty should also be

involved in the administration role. There is an urgent need to plan a crash


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program to train management teachers at selected management institution, &

also to limit the expansion of the system to what is sustainable with out

sacrificing the faculty quality. The quality of faculty is going down as more

and more institutes mushroom with the aim of making money rather than

enhancing the quality of education.

Development of teaching materials & case studies:

Very few institutions in the country have been able to develop adequate

teaching materials including cases in terms of Indian ethics in management.

So there is a need to venture wide-spread management research includingcase research & publications indigenously

Institute- Industry linkages:

It is now essential to make the changes according to changing environment

to meet the challenges of globalization and liberalization. Therefore it is

necessary for the management institutions to have linkages between business

and industry to understand their requirement and reorient teaching, training

consultancy and research activities. Institutes should involve senior

executives as faculty for exposing the students to real life problems &

exposures of industry. Also interaction of faculty and executives should be

made possible by organizing conferences. The present system of business

interaction (six-eight weeks) is quite inadequate. It is necessary to have

longer summer trainings, perhaps even extended up to one full term.

Assessment should also be based on internship.

Government role:

A quality improvement by transparency in the management education is

possible only with the help of government only like selection of experts on


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the monitoring panel should be based on certain qualitative parameters or

criteria taking into consideration their professional background and

admirable achievements. Governments role should be more of monitoring

than controlling and the relationship between government and institutions

should be based on trust not on distrust. More liberty should be provided to

private institutions, with some qualitative directors.

Placement:

The provision of placement is an activity which is reducing the identity of

educational institutional as place of academics & students are takingadmission to use its label and institutes are gradually taking the shape of the

agency where students just seek employment opportunities. Placement cell

should be treated as the platform for interaction between student and

prospective employees. It should create opportunity for students for getting

exposed to the relative job market. It should work towards sensitizing the

student to be down to earth to know where the stand. In short placement

should be de- linked from academic institutions in the sense that placement

cell should not be treated as an employment bureau.

Pedagogy:

The central concern in all the pedagogy is interaction between traders,

student & content which is basically dynamic and triadic in nature. The 21st

century has opened new hopes for re-engineering our approach to

pedagogical producers at all levels of education in the new domain of

information technology. Needless to observe that main focus of pedagogy

still remains the art of disseminating and relating knowledge to the needs

and mental equipments of the educated. Now it is the need that pedagogy

should be more learner centered than trainer centered, more case study


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oriented than lecture method; more exposure to realities of industries and

work environment, project method should be used to promote discovery

learning , more emphasis should be laid on simulation, role playing, socio

drama etc.

Values:

Future managers should know the practical aspects of work ethics, like how

ethics can be developed, how they can be managed at workplace, how

individual makes his/her values, what are the contents of ethics which can be

utilized to motivate human resources at work place since organizations arenot having ethics-only people have." Business ethics is something that

shouldn't be compromised. Developing values that enable decision-making

in grey areas characterized by inadequate information or conflicts (like profit

v/s integrity) is a tricky issue.

Governance:

Governance of institutions should be transparent. There should be only one

body with norms specified for accreditation or ranking of B-schools.

Government bodies should not interfere with ranking and accreditation

issues. The government should only lay down the norms, rules and

regulations or, in case of the curriculum, lay down the broad outlines. It

should be mandatory for all the institutes to comply with the criteria, but

they should still have autonomy in fields like selection of students, faculty,up-gradation of courses etc. This rating creates a feeling of competition and

helps other institutes set benchmarks for them.

How should Business Schools organize themselves for quality?


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1. Offer greater flexibility in program design e.g. moving into new areas

such as Health Care Management, Technology and Higher Education

Management, Social enterprise management etc.

2. Accommodate cutting edge knowledge by greater customization and

getting away from commoditization.

3. Provide greater choices to students in the areas about which they are

passionate and have fewer compulsory courses.

4. There must be a change in the focus on what to deliver and how to deliver

to make room for rapidly moving conditions.

5. Introduce greater diversity in class rooms across disciplines,

socioeconomic groups, gender and geography.

6. Need to have greater diversity in faculty, bring in more global faculty, and

send the existing faculty for exposure to best schools. Teaching sans

research backing is sterile and does not excite the bright students admitted to

the best Management schools.

7. Promote Quality on all fronts including governance (the Boards should be

drawn from men and women of high caliber from all walks of life) and in

internal management (hire those who believe in result-oriented processes).

8. Instill and promote ethical conduct and values such as passion and

commitment, contribution to community, breakthrough thinking and

execution.


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9. Establish closer linkages with the corporate sector, non profit sector,

public sector, communities; have regular dialogues with private businesses

and listen to their concerns.

Conclusion:

It can be concluded that the existence of an institution shall depend upon the

quality of education and training offered. Now principle of Darwin holds

well even today that fittest that would survive. The existing education in

management is mainly large industry oriented to meet the domestic needs of

manufacturing sector. New it is the need to make it as per the demand for

managers for international Business Information Technology, medium and

small scale industries and for service sector, because in future fittest will

survive for which quality product service will be the key aspect. To ensure

quality in management education, inclusion of BPR, IDR & ISO9000 and

ISO1000 etc. can be utilized.

paper- quality issues in management

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